Aktiemarknaden ur ett psykologiskt perspektiv utifrån finansanalytikers synvinkel

Sammanfattning: The Swedish population has the world’s largest percentage of shareholders either by direct or indirect owning. Due to the increasing interest of equity capital markets, private as well as institutional investors rely on forecasts from financial analysts. The reason for this is due to the lack of expertise among investors in this area. Due to the fact that analysts influence the Swedish stock market immensely, it’s of great interest to explore whether an analyst can be seen as a rational participant. At the same time, we would like to see what impact psychological factors have on the analysts in their work and which these psychological factors are. To battle these questions, we have chosen to take a qualitative approach in our research, basing it on interviews. In our opinion, interviewing a person gives a more balanced picture as the respondents have the possibility to have a dialog/discussion with the interviewer. The selection of interviewees was not random, instead we chose to interview nine different financial analysts working for big popular firms in Stockholm and Copenhagen. Our research presents the psychological factors which affect financial analysts. We are convinced to have found strong enough indications to draw general conclusions for financial analysts, active on the Nordic stock market. The study has shown a given relation between experience and psychological effects. The awareness of the psychological impact on the stock market exists among all financial analysts. But we have found that it’s more likely for an inexperienced financial analyst to be affected by these. The factors that have the largest effect on analysts are mostly trends, herding, overreaction and noise. Finally our research shows a psychological position of dependence for the companies the analyst value. These are the providers of information for analysts, in practice a sale recommendation can lead to less information being shared with him or her. Further on, it’s generally seen to be more commercial correct publishing a buy recommendation as these generate more incomes and business connection for the analyst’s employer. The conclusions points out that an analyst often adopts over-optimism when analysing companies.